Declaration of War

 We're at war and we don't know it. 

 For a long while now we've been at war. And it's a world war. And we're losing it. It's a war with casualties from mostly one side only, but it's a very civic war. In this war, most of the time, it's not like someone will come to us and shoot us, oh no. That's not polite. In this war we lose little by little, our lives and our time. Although in some areas you do get shot, where the fight is in its worse shape. It's an asymetrical war, both sides are rather different in numbers and power. But it's a war nonetheless. 

This war has been raging for all our history. Sometimes there's calm periods and truces. Sometimes there's small victories. But lately it's going worse for us, after a period where it seemed we could achieve some level of victory, or at least a reasonable truce. 

 We've had recent battles in plenty of places. In Brazil, we lost to ignorance and stupidity, and because of its current culture it may take some time before any victories can be achieved. In Chile there was a recent stand off that gives us hope after a long period of darkness, but it needs to be developed and to grow into a victory, and it may not be one just yet. In Bolivia we won after almost losing an important battle. Hong Kong seems lost, the battle continues but the enemy is too brutal in there. In USA we were defeated so long ago nobody remembers our side, but lately there's been some movements towards a change, although it's still in its infancy, and the latest results are not really a victory. Poland was never in our side but maybe after the latest abuse some reaction will be triggered. I'm not informed enough to talk about countries in Africa but it seems there's been an ongoing change in there too, little by little, in some of them small victories for us. Turkey has been conquered after a period of hope, and we need to recover it but won't be easy. Russia had some chances but the opportunity was not taken. Most religious-based countries mark a huge defeat for us.

Spain was lost since 1939, and is still lost to this day. Catalunya has a chance to be a small win, but Spain will fight us to the death. 

One side is always the same: Fascism, dictatorships, unchecked corruption, economic power, religious power. The other is just the average person. 

The war is simple: Average people want to have nice lives. Lives where you do work, but you also have free time, health, friends, and where you can work with what you like. Lives where you can allow yourself presents, for you and your friends and family. Where you can have vacations and visit places. Where you can have moments of rest and calmness. Where you can believe whatever you want and no one imposes their views on you. Where you can retire and you don't need to die right away. Where people help each other. and where we can collectively decide things for ourselves. Then we have internal struggles about how to achieve these objectives, but that's the idea.

The other side wants to have these things only for a few of themselves, the chosen ones, and everyone else should suffer and die slowly to provide these things to them, It's a simple as that.

 Maybe this seems simplistic or evident. But what I want to remark, is that this is WAR. When people get kicked out of their houses, people DIE. When factories are closed down, people DIE. When hospitals are privatized and medicine is not affordable, people DIE. Those are casualties. When some rich or powerful bastard takes a decision to withheld resources for the common people, this person is PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for the impoverishment, misery and death of these people. Same way I would be accused of not helping someone that was bleeding to death in my house if I ignored them and didn't call an ambulance nor did anything at all.

All this was to explain a few things regarding the current struggles:

 1-This war is all the same war. Catalan people wanting to vote and getting beaten by police is the same war as Hong Kong people wanting to decide for themselves and getting beaten by police. It's the same war as BLM in USA. Its the same war as medical professionals asking for more resources. It's the same war as workers asking for better conditions. It's the same war. So, support all of them and don't be blinded.

2-A lot of idiots are supporting the wrong side because in their little evil minds, they think they're part of the powerful side and that they will get better lives through it. The reality is that they will be squashed and discarded with all the rest, but since they will not be the first ones and the first ones are a group they don't like, they think this is good and later they'll be spared. 

3-Being neutral or equidistant, or "centrist" here means support to the powerful. As they say in Germany, a table with 1 Nazi and 9 people that let them be there is a table with 10 Nazis. And thinking the one doing the beating is the same as the one being beaten is morally abhorrent. 

4-Civility is not an option when it results in one side always winning because they're the only ones that can be nasty and violent and brutal while the other side is expected to put the other cheek and accept their fate and "be nice". Doing a "smart" economic operation that can force a building full of people to be kicked out to the streets should be responded with the same rage and pain that it has caused and the person responsible should suffer horrible consequences for it.

5-The current health crisis is making everything on hold, but we should not forget that we're at war, and you can see whose lives have been the most affected and who's reaping benefits from all this, and understand then who needs to be defeated. 

Any approach that doesn't take this into consideration, that doesn't understand this is a war, that doesn't understand that we're all going to suffer and die unless we turn the tide strongly to the other side will not succeed. To go back to USA, the current election results will not achieve anything at all, things will just get worse a bit more slowly in there, the important defeat there was in the democratic primaries and after that one the end result would be bad or horrible, but never good.

The "agree to disagree" and moderation is for cake, not for the worth of human lives. And Nazi Germany was not defeated with hugs and good intentions.

It's the end of the world (as we know it)

So, we're again in Interesting Times. And maybe we have had enough for a while.

Nevertheless, this has created an opportunity at least. Yeah, it's a horrible thing what's happening and it would be better if it didn't, but it's giving us lessons, really important ones. And I'd like to mention some of them, as I think about them.

1-In lots of workplaces, it is possible to work from home. This one is written from a privileged standpoint, of course, shops and industries and the primary sector is not included in this. But there's currently a lot of new jobs, based on services, where we have been forced to go there every day and stay there for a lot of hours, to be present just out of a certain old fashioned panic that if we don't have someone breathing on our neck, we won't work. Well, not the case, clearly. At the same time, there's meetings and such things that in the end were not as necessary as we thought and can be shortened or eliminated without that much problem. For sure in-person contact has its advantages too, but this should really made us rethink how we work, and try a more balanced system where maybe we can easily be home at least half of our time.

2-Really essential services are the primary sector, the food shops and the cleaners. Jobs like working in a supermarket or cleaning offices and houses should be better valued and paid nicely. Also better considered.

3-Healtchare must be public. Private healthcare that depends on profit has no advantage in dealing with this, because it requires a lot of resources and hours and it's overall too expensive. Also, public healthcare must be well-funded and have enough resources. And given this learning, I would go further: Just straight up ban and nationalize private healthcare companies. Also, if you're all for private healthcare and vote for parties that are against public one, it's only fair you refute any treatment nor help in public hospitals and facilities. Or reconsider your vote next time.

4-Capitalsim doesn't work. The system is totally broken and this crisis is showing its worst sides. Under pure capitalism, we would need to continue working right now, as we die left and right. Under pure capitalism, now people should just go hungry and starve and die out as they cannot work. Under pure capitalism, any business that was unable to function for this period should just close and disappear, or leave its employees to die out at least. This is neither a sustainable model nor a model we should want to keep. This needs to go. I'm not advocating for communism, but we must get rid of the idea that the market is great, when the truth is the market would see humankind destroyed in order to keep benefits. We have seen this before, in the people that lose track of the real world and require workers to do extra hours to finish a project that will ultimately have no meaning 2 weeks after completion. Well, I'm exaggerating a bit on this example, but this same attitude is the one where some manager considers that maybe people should just work, because the company needs it, without realizing this means people will die.

5-Related to this, we need to make people in power responsible for their actions. Managers who have disregarded warnings and asked people to work have killed people. Governments who haven't taken action once it was clear how serious the situation was and have not followed medical expert's recommendations are guilty of personally killing people. One thing is not knowing what to do, another very different is thinking that since your friend the banker prefers people to die than to close some of his business, you can allow it. Or allowing it out of some political agenda. This means you are killing people. And this is not the only situation when this happens: when a government allows banks to kick people out of their homes from unpaid mortgages, both the bank and the government are directly killing people. When a manager over stresses their workforce to the point of people having nervous breakdowns, they are directly killing people. When a rich bastard not only doesn't pay their taxes but also pressures the government to close public hospitals, they're directly killing people. No more fucking euphemism, if you do these things you're a killer, and you should not be allowed to get away with it.

6-Centralism doesn't work. Look, I think Spain is a failed project and I'd rather be left out of it. Maybe you don't think the same, that's fine. But what is undeniable, as we've seen in companies, countries and other organizations, is that when you centralize everything, when you try to manage personally more and more and more things, when you're further away from the real action separated by layers of responsible people, well, you have a less clear image of what is happening. In this crisis, hospitals and small towns or neighborhoods can know better what's the best actions to take. They can know better what resources they have, what do they lack, what to do. So you leave them be, unless they prove to be doing a bad job out of it. Then, if they lack things, if you have organizations over them you can manage that from such a higher level, and so on. But when you try to, basically, micromanage everywhere, that doesn't work. So let's not do that. From a government point of view, I believe regions should be more independent and able to take their own decisions, since they tend to know better their own needs. For example, now Spain has declared we can go back to work. This is idiotic and will cause deaths as the experts are saying (see point 5), but I'd say that for some regions it may be OK. However, should be managed region by region as I said, to see which ones can do it and which ones cannot.

7-Spain's traditional parties plus the right wing parties are useless. Right wing, we know, they're here to steal and lick their rich friend's anuses, and people can die as far as they care, we all know that. However, I hope it also helps to show that PSOE is almost as bad: they militarized the crisis instead of giving funds to healthcare, and since their members are professional politicians that don't know how to do things but know how to get paid from public funds, we've had the situation were resources are not reaching the people, or they buy the wrong things and millions are wasted, plus time is lost.

8-Left-wing parties do not deserve special protection just because they're considered left-wing. We made this mistake before with PSOE, letting it do things that were not left-wing just because we labelled it as the left-wing party. So, the same applies now to Podemos. They're part of the government even if they're not big enough to make some changes. I understand they're not able to criticize some of the government actions without creating a conflict, but that doesn't make them untouchable. We should criticize the fact that they let military to lead this crisis. We should criticize that they're not protecting workers by allowing people to work. And we should criticize their silence or their praise to the current government, when it's not right.

9-USA, UK and Brazil, as very capitalist and right-wing countries, are far from the worst of it, and it will be a massacre in there. Spain is already one because of several of the mentioned points, and forcing people back to work now will kill and numbers will grow again.

10-Catalunya's proposals have been a bit more smart than Spain's (because duh, it's not very hard to be), but far from effective, and one of the involved parties has also been de-funding public healthcare, and that's something we should not forget either.

There's plenty more things I could say, but politically speaking I find these are quite relevant...

Economics, Apartments And MMORPGs

As I mentioned in previous posts, we're currently searching for an apartment to buy. If we don't find anything before we go to Rio it's fine, but we're investigating to see what's in the market, and if there's an affordable apartment that we like, we will not wait 2 years to get it. Right now we've found one that we may like, and we've even made an offer, but things are still pretty much in the air.

As I said, the whole selection process deserves another post, but right now I'd like to talk about apartment prices, their negotiations, and economics in general. And also how the experience of playing in a Massive Multiplayer Online game helps a lot as an Economics case study, for apartments and for the world in general.

Apartment prices in Spain are still stupidly high compared to people's salaries, but right now they're reaching a level where you can consider to buy one without sacrificing your first-born to the bank. Second hand apartments are still the only option because, with a few exceptions, new apartments are owned by banks. Bank managers (as in bank owners and directors, not office workers nor office directors) know that the prices have gone down and nobody is even able to consider paying such prices for new apartments, but if they lower the prices of new apartments they need to write down that they lost money. Of course, they'd prefer to rape their mothers before admitting that they screw up big time and that they have thousands of useless empty houses that give no benefit, so instead they don't lower the prices and maintain a price bubble.

They hope that the prices will go up again and they will get a benefit. This may happen, but it may take 50-100 years (which is how many years may be needed to get back to a situation in Spain where most people not only can easily buy houses, but can also eat afterwards). Meanwhile, our friendly Spanish government gives them our money (recovered from us through taxes) so they can continue operating without having to get money from selling that big amount of useless cheap houses.

So, we're left with the second-hand house market.

In there, things are currently interesting. Prices were not able to resist the evident difference between supply and demand, and they have plummeted quite a lot. Just 7 years ago it was normal to pay 500.000 euros for a small hole in a wall, and now it is reasonable to get decent places for 200.000 or less (depends on size of apartment, situation, age, state, etc.).

Now we're in the process of negotiating the price for an apartment we consider as an option.

Negotiating prices, reading the market tendencies and the economy in general reminds me a lot about the time I was playing Lineage 2. Lineage 2 is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or MMORPG for short, pronounced like yhatzee does). You have a permanent world where you log in and your character appears. Levelling up and progressing through Lineage 2 is an extremely hard task (or it was when I was playing) that it's not easy achievable. (all the following comments are based on my experiences of the game when I was playing it, before 2008).

The problem I faced when I was playing Lineage 2, is that to level up you need to invest a lot of money in resources and equipment. And the process of levelling up does not reward you with equivalent money. Basically, to level up you need to lose big amounts of in-game money. To be fair, there are ways to get money levelling up and hunting monsters, but they require you to play for 8 hours straight, together with more people, and to limit usage of resources to a minimum. Even like this, profits are minimal. In this world it is true that permanent growth is possible, since when you kill a monster more money gets added to the world. Anyway, this creates funny economic dynamics.

To put it in perspective...once you reach level 20, the equipment that you will need to start using at that moment to be able to fight people and monsters of your level costs close to 2 millions in the internal currency. Once you get to level 20, if killing monsters has reported you around 100.000 of the internal currency count yourself as lucky.

As you can see, there is a bit of a gap between standard income and necessary money to survive. This only gets worse in later levels, since after level 40 the equipment you need is not even sold in game shops, you need to craft it from pieces that monsters drop. Getting all required pieces takes usually more time than levelling up to the point where the equipment you were trying to create is now useless to you.

As a result of all of this, the basis of living in that world is player commerce. Players have the option to trade things and even open shops that offer things and services (like crafting services). Capitalism is king, and prices evolve with the time depending on demand and on what is affordable by most players. What's more, thanks to the constant influx of money to the economy from the players, the world is in a permanent state of inflation, with very strange and particular cases of devaluation. The ones that got rich keep getting richer, and new players will have it very hard to reach a stable economic situation where you don't need to save every single coin.

This really teaches you the workings of the real world, if you want to survive inside the game. For example inside the game I managed to establish a small business of selling helmets. These helmets were needed to complete a set that gave some extra stats for players between level 40 and 52.

However, I did not own any helmets. I did not have the pieces and materials that allowed you to build such helmets. I did definitely not have the ability to even finish building these helmets.

What I was doing was buying materials in a city, for a price that I knew was rather cheap. I bought them in bulk, and when I had my calculated quotas of materials then I proceeded to contract players who had shops to create composite materials. Finally, I contracted someone who was able to made the actual helmet from the composite materials and pieces.

Once I had the helmet (or helmets), I proceeded to go to another city where this helmet had the biggest price (because prices changed from city to city, given the fact that reaching each city required different levels and hours of play). In there I opened a shop and sold the helmet.

Recollecting and buying all the composite materials and pieces, and then contracting other players to build composites and the final helmet was a long process, and it costed around 1.2 millions in the game currency.

However, the completed helmets were sold for prices between 2 and 3.5 millions (depending on the moment). In the worst case, I got 166% of the invested money back. In the best case, 290%. And I did absolutely nothing. I was just an intermediate that knew prices of materials and prices of the finished item, and knew which margins were acceptable. Sure, I wasted a lot of in-game time on this, but it was usually time I was studying at university, and meanwhile my computer was on with the automatic shop activated so other players could sell me materials or buy my helmets.

Sometimes I got people competing, trying to sell helmets next to me for 1.5 million and similar things.I just bought all their helmets with my investment money and sold them for 2.5, getting me an easy, fast and clean benefit of 1 million per helmet.

So, this game showed quite easily a number of points that you always need to consider in doing businesses and buying things, especially when their prices do not match the price of materials used or hours invested in them:

1-Living is expensive, and working hard does not guarantee that you will have money or that you'll be able to afford necessary things.

2-In order to win lots of money, you need to start with lots of money.

3-Without laws regulating business, established companies can ruin any competitors by just buying their stock to resell it at inflated prices or by selling at a loss until the competitors run out of business.

4-Try to avoid as many distributors, agents and other intermediaries between the maker of the product and you. Each step makes the final product stupidly more expensive than the real cost of making it.

5-Monopolies will abuse their position of power and inflate prices.

6-Even with inflated prices and monopolies, customers will call bullshit when the price is too much, and they will opt to live without your product if necessary.

There are more lessons that you can take from the game, but there's no need to list all of them. It's just to show that these games are great examples of pure capitalism (and how incredibly crappy it is for everyone that doesn't have a great idea or control over some particular market). It also shows the catastrophes that can happen in such unregulated markets. (there's a lot of other MMO games that can show you examples of this).

Regarding apartments, what the game taught me is that the price of such things is as much as people are willing to pay. Building an apartment does not cost their actual prices. The apartment prices depend on the idea of a fair price that most people will have in their minds, and prices will change only when people think they should change.

At the moment, every week or two I get notifications that some apartment I was interested dropped 10.000 euros, or even 20.000.

I believe that no matter what newspapers and government are trying to advertise, people still can't pay for apartments, and what's more, people still believe they should not pay for such prices and that prices will go down. There's a big advertising campaign to change people's minds, but I don't believe it's working yet.

I want an apartment where we can live, and I don't care if the prices will drop more, or will increase later. I just want our own place. However, it is an interesting moment to buy, and it is funny to see all the people trying to convince you prices might rise a lot any time next week...

Maybe I'm wrong and prices will really increase soon....but somehow I doubt it.